MY FAVORITE COMICS - "What if Conan the barbarian walked the Earth today?" from What if #13

Conan the barbarian was BIG when I was a kid. There was the Schwarzenegger movie, naturally, but also tons of comics. The Barbarian seemed ubiquitous and the artwork on those comics, oh my! John Buscema could do no wrong in my book. Still, the stories seemed kind of repetitious to me... then one day, I hit upon this brazilian reprint including the story from What if? #13 - What if Conan the barbarian walked the earth today? - and all of a sudden I'm captivated by this tale unlike any other featuring this character before or after. Maybe it was my love of time travel stories, maybe it was the juxtaposition of the rude brute with the modern world, maybe it was the lovely female character of Danette, perhaps it could have been the fact that this story was different enough from the trappings of the sword and sorcery genre to break the clichés I was already used to or at least disguise them enough to captivate me... whatever it was, I loved this comic then and still do now.

MY FAVORITE COMICS - Marvel Treasury Edition The Astonishing Spider-Man #18

This one was my gateway into the Marvel universe way back in the late 1970s and I must say I was scared. I still couldn't read but I was smart enough to follow the story though the drawings and they generated strong emotions in me. Nowadays I'd probably list this as horror fiction and like the best horror it made me feel simultaneously repulsed and attracted to this strange world. I already knew Spider-man from the animation tv series with the catchy intro song (Spider-man, Spider-man, does whatever a spider can ...) and all the related merchandise but seeing him on print felt different: I found him scary! The guest-heroes on this book (the original X-Men, the Werewolf, Ghost Rider, Iron Fist) seemed like monsters and the villains... well, if the heroes were scary, then the villains were the stuff of nightmares. To this day I can still remember the unmasking of The Orb, villain on the Ghost Rider adventure, and the strange fate of Drom, the Backwards Man, villain on the Iron Fist segment. There are so many images from this comic that I still find haunting like the covers by Bob Budiansky and Ernie Chan or the initial splash page of the X-Men crossover, pencilled by Gil Kane and featuring Peter Parker having a nightmare with Morbius the Living Vampire. Imagination unbound!